Continuously phasing since 1996

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Electron is a pure abstraction.

This morning I have been chatting with my college roomate from freshman year. We chat most days, actually, but today she brought me back to the past, a forgotten past. She went home to her mother’s and picked up a book we read in a class we took together, an English class on Science Fiction. The book is Canticle for Leibowitz. Inside it was a note we passed back and forth in class. I have no recollection of writing it. She shared two bits:

C: “Electron is a pure abstraction. HOW DEEP. Lunesse gasps in awe.”

C is me. I have no idea…is there an Electron character in that book? This also dates how long I have used the name Lunesse online. I took this class in 1992/1993. By then I was on the internet with my persona already, though at the time she was a wizard slaying monsters on a MUD. That’s where she was born.

A: “Well you know… this is the same class in which one of our loser peers enlightened us to the fact: ‘writing in present tense would just be stupid.’ Panick’s brains leak out of her head and swirl down a drain.

That’s her. I have no idea who our loser peer is, or why writing in future tense would be stupid. Panick was her first online character, a thief. We spent hours playing muds while on the phone at the same time for optimum communication in battle.

I wish I remembered that moment… a short period of time. I love my college so much…and hold on to so much of it…but in a way…it’s nice there are moments that are gone even when right in front of me. Lost time, so delicious when read about even, if not completely regained.

I do not remember the book at all. Maybe I will have to try again. Books are infinitely more entertaining and interesting the moment they are no longer ‘homework.’

I meant the comments you’d written in class – you were obviously VERY dismissive of your “loser peers”!!!! And I think you can be a geek snob….you have to believe that you are a far better geek than other geeks…..”Oh God, that programming script/computer game/technology is *so* last year….”

Does Nethack count as a MUD? I used to play that obsessively. I’ve been known to still use “grid bug bites!” on occasion, outside in the summertime. No one in my vicinity usually gets the reference, but I sometimes live in my own world.